Wednesday, June 7, 2017

Mosul Campaign Day 233 Jun 6 2017

Civilians fleeing fighting in WMosul (New York Times)

Progress in west Mosul has been very slow as many predicted.
The Federal Police claimed they held 75% of Zinjali.
On June 3 they said they had
up to 85% of the neighborhood. These types of figures are always changing
depending upon the source, and are also driven by the government’s desire to
always have positive news come out about the battle. Yesterday, the Federal
Police and Rapid Reaction Division attacked the
Old City district from the north to try to make a breakthrough. The district
has held up the police for four months now. Originally, Iraqi commanders said
they could take all of Mosul in just a few days, again the result of Iraqi propaganda
demands. A Ninewa councilman predicted that the
fight would take weeks, and hoped that by the end of June the city would be
liberated. Several Iraqi officers and the U.S. spokesman warned that this last
push would be difficult, and it is proving so.

Out west the Hashd captured
17 more villages around Baaj. Kurdish President Massoud Barzani had more harsh words for their
presence in west Ninewa. He said that their presence in Kurdish territory was
unacceptable, and violated an agreement with Baghdad about the conduct of the
Mosul campaign. Barzani sees the Hashd’s presence as a threat to his party’s
control of Sinjar district, which has been difficult since his Kurdistan
Democratic Party (KDP) abandoned it in the face of the Islamic State in 2014 opening
the local Yazidis to massacres by the insurgents. The Kurdistan Workers Party
(PKK) moved in from Syria to free many Yazidi areas and have stayed since. Now
the Hashd are coming and doing the same. If the KDP had swept through all the
Yazidi towns this would not have happened.

Agence
France Presse (AFP) talked with families who had their sons arrested by
Kurdish security while staying in displaced camps. One woman had her two sons
picked up by the Asayesh for accusations that they were IS members. Another man
said his son was arrested as well. Weeks later they got letters from the Red
Cross telling them where their children were. This comes after Human Rights
Watch (HRW) released a report on the same topic. Kurdish authorities rejected
both HRW and AFP’s accounts claiming that all detainees receive a lawyer,
information is given about their whereabouts to their families who can also
visit them. In reality, there is no due process in Kurdistan or in the rest of
Iraq. People are routinely picked up and held incommunicado for long periods of
times. They usually don’t get access to a lawyer until they go to trial. The
security forces and justice system is even more overwhelmed now than before due
to the war with the Islamic State so the time it takes for someone to be
processed and released is likely much longer now than before.

Activists in Ninewa want justice for IS members and are
threatening to go outside the courts if nothing is done about them. People in
Hamam al-Alil, the main screening center for people coming out of Mosul, and
displaced camps complained that IS members were in their midst and wanted
something done about not only them, but their families as well. People said
that if the security forces and courts didn’t do something about it they would
take matters into their own hands. Again, the justice system in Iraq is
currently over stretched. The number of cases it has to go through due to the
Ninewa battle is enormous. Even if someone is released or found innocent there
are likely others that feel that the suspect is guilty and wants that person to
pay. The threat of tribal justice or vigilantism is real in the province, and is
probably already happening in some areas. The fact that Baghdad has no
reconciliation plan for the province and the rest of Iraq only means these
disputes will continue to fester.

On June 4, the International Organization for Migration counted
383,808 displaced since the Mosul campaign started in October 2016. An average
of 2,000-7,000 have left Mosul each day since the new operation started at the
end of May. As of May 30, 177,483 displaced have also returned to the city.
42,246 went to the western section, and 135,237 to the east. Many people have
gone back to be close to their homes, because they did not like living in the
displaced camps or because there was no room there. Inside Mosul services are
still a problem such as clean water. Much of the city’s water is being trucked
in, and there is no money to repair the water treatment plants. Rebuilding will
be very slow as there is still fighting going on and the government lacks the
funds to do much more than fix and provide the very basics for the citizenry.

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About Me

Musings On Iraq was started in 2008 to explain the political, economic, security and cultural situation in Iraq via original articles and interviews. I have written for the Jamestown Foundation, Tom Ricks’ Best Defense at Foreign Policy and the Daily Beast, and was responsible for a chapter in the book Volatile Landscape: Iraq And Its Insurgent Movements. My work has been published in Iraq via NRT, AK News, Al-Mada, Sotaliraq, All Iraq News, and Ur News all in Iraq. I was interviewed on BBC Radio 5, Radio Sputnik, CCTV and TRT World News TV, and have appeared in CNN, the Christian Science Monitor, The National, Columbia Journalism Review, Mother Jones, PBS’ Frontline, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Institute for the Study of War, Radio Free Iraq, Rudaw, and others. I have also been cited in Iraq From war To A New Authoritarianism by Toby Dodge, Imagining the Nation Nationalism, Sectarianism and Socio-Political Conflict in Iraq by Harith al-Qarawee, ISIS Inside the Army of Terror by Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassahn, The Rise of the Islamic State by Patrick Cocburn, and others. If you wish to contact me personally my email is: motown67@aol.com